Robert Kern wrote: > Sebastian Haase wrote: >> I know that having too much knowledge of the details often makes one >> forget what the "newcomers" will do and expect. > > Please be more careful with such accusations. Repeated frequently, they can > become quite insulting. > I did not mean to insult anyone - what I meant was, that I'm for numpy becoming an easy platform to use. I have spend and enjoyed part the last four years developing and evangelizing Python as an alternative to Matlab and C/Fortran based image analysis environment. I often find myself arguing for good support of the single precision data format. So I find it actually somewhat ironic to see myself arguing now for wanting float64 over float32 ;-)
>> We are only talking >> about people that will a) work with single-precision data (e.g. large >> scale-image analysis) and who b) will tend to "just use the default" >> (dtype) --- How else can I say this: these people will just assume that >> arr.mean() *is* the mean of arr. > > I don't understand what you mean, here. arr.mean() is almost never *the* mean > of > arr. Double precision can't fix that. > This was not supposed to be a scientific statement -- I'm (again) thinking of our students that not always appreciate the full complexity of computational numerics and data types and such. The best I can hope for is a "sound" default for most (practical) cases... I still think that 80bit vs. 128bit vs 96bit is rather academic for most people ... most people seem to only use float64 and then there are some that use float32 (like us) ... Cheers, Sebastian ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys -- and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=DEVDEV _______________________________________________ Numpy-discussion mailing list Numpy-discussion@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/numpy-discussion
